Win Butler was on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1 show and talked about how many songs were brought to the recording process and how it evolved into a double album.

"I think in Connecticut we were playing maybe 50 or 60 songs, like we literally played 60 songs while we were there and then kind of slowly refined it."

There's only 6-7 songs on each album, so he talked about how that still is enough to stretch into two complete albums worth of material: "It's longer than [2010 album] 'The Suburbs' – it's a double record – mostly down to the fact that the songs are a lot longer. I mean, 'Reflector' is seven-and-a-half, there's another couple of seven-minute songs on the record and so it made more sense to stretch it out to two records with two distinct sides. It's more of a classic double LP vibe where you have to flip the side and it takes you to a different place. "